Tuesday, April 23, 2013

A few walks in woodland areas over the past week has turned up a variety of wildflowers. Despite some unusually cold temperatures in the last couple weeks, spring is clearly underway, and we can expect more in the next few weeks. Here are a few wildflowers that are blooming now.

Spring beauties are among the first wildflowers to bloom, and are often found in dense colonies.

Trout lilies are often seen in dense colonies as well.

Mayapples are sprouting, but I have not seen any in bloom yet. The flowers is attached to the stem, underneath the broad leaf.

Virginia bluebells are also in bloom.

I have trouble finding trillium in the woods so here are a few from a garden instead, starting with great white trillium.

Friday, April 19, 2013

The results are in for the 2013 Great Backyard Bird Count; as expected, winter finches and Razorbills made a strong showing. One interesting result was that the birds most frequently reported outside the U.S. and Canada are native to India.

Scientists have sequenced the genome for the African Coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae). The analysis showed that the coelacanth and lungfish (both lobe-finned fish) are more closely related to mammals than to other types of fish, which supports the idea that mammals and other tetrapods evolved from lobe-finned fish.

Recent research on the coelacanths and other ancient lineages has shown that "living fossil" is an inaccurate concept; such organisms have undergone evolution at rates similar to other species, even if they remain superficially similar to their ancient forebears.

Wednesday's explosion at a fertilizer plant in Texas has rightly raised questions about the safety of the fertilizer industry. There are also a variety of environmental problems associated with the industry due to its reliance on natural gas from fracking and nutrient runoff that causes massive dead zones in the Chesapeake Bay, Gulf of Mexico, and elsewhere.

Scientists have found one colony of Adélie Penguins that seems to have benefited from climate change, even as most other penguin colonies have suffered.

Goosefish, which normally feed near the bottom, have been found preying on Dovekies, a type of seabird. Scientists now suspect that goosefish occasionally hunt close to the surface, where Dovekies feed on amphipods.

During the Napoleonic Wars, one of Napoleon's generals collected beetles as the army traveled around, sometimes even stopping during battle to pick them up. His collections have now been catalogued in two articles in the open-access journal Zookeys, here and here.

Scientists are figuring out how dragonflies manage to have a success rate of 95% when pursuing prey. Experiments, often funded by the military, are looking how their wings work, what their eyes see, and how their brains process the images. One interesting finding is that dragonflies are able to see two targets but focus on one target first and then pursue the other target, without getting too distracted to nab either.